I'll be dividing the game into sections (modes, units, maps, etc) and be telling you what kind of game this is. I'll start off with the big things that people ask about like the campaign, nations and everything else. I'll be writing a pretty long and detailed review; just read what you want.
Basic info and unique features: First off this is a strategy game staged during WWII; using your mind is key in winning! This game is heavy based on strategy and the "RUSE Cards." Chance and luck doesn't play much in this game. For example: if a unit is in range of an enemy unit and you choose to fire upon it, the enemy will be hit there's no chance the shell will miss it. It's different from Close Combat games where the enemy is in range but the shell shot may miss. This game is more "global strategy," though you can still micro manage things. The maps are built on a table, like a war planning table the you see in movies where they're planning their attacks and things. It's pretty unique. Zooming in will in a way put you on the battlefield and you can see the horizon--zooming out will put you in the war room and show you the table and the war room environment. The war room differs according to which map you're playing on. If you play on the map D-Day the war room will be a ship with hatches and things. Very nice.
Campaign: The game has only one campaign, the Allies. There's no option to play a German or Axis campaign, only the Allies. But you can in 4 missions choose to use German units, but you'll still be on the Allies' side. So you will be able use German units, but you don't have a full 20 missions long campaign. The Allies' campaign is composed of 22 missions including the 4 mission where you can use German units, excluding the prologue, which isn't even a mission you only control 2 units for about 5 minutes. Anyway, the 22 missions are stretched over North Africa till Germany 1945. There are 4 missions in North Africa, 4 in Italy, 3 in France, 3 in Holland, 3 in Belgium, and finally 5 in Germany. You play as a General Joseph Sheridan a fictional character, no one real in WWII. The game doesn't end like most WWII games with the Battle of Berlin, it has a twist. For me it took exactly 1 week for me to finish the campaign on Strategy Fan difficulty (medium), there's 2 more difficulty levels, Beginner Strategist (easy) and War Gamer (hard), it also depends on how much you play, I play... well a lot. So it didn't take too long for me to finish, but the missions can get long, it also depend on how fast of a speed you want to play it on, and how much you play of course. Unit limit in campaign missions is 40 units and there is no time limit for the campaign missions.
Nations: You can play as Germany, USA, UK, France, Italy, USSR, and Japan can be played but you have to buy the Rising Sun expansion pack. Each nation has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example the UK has the best air force in terms of feasibility, production speed, and cost. Many people playing as the UK will have a flyboy style gameplay. Although they have an armor base to produce tanks, tanks aren't their strong suit; they actually have the worst tanks! Italy has cheap and fast units but they aren't resistant to too much fire. They rely on fast strikes, overwhelming numbers and continuous pressure on the enemy to crack them. The USSR has an incredibly fast production rate of infantry squads, thus many people rush with Soviet troops! They advance in the armored vehicles category, which comprises of the best tanks the Soviet industries have to offer with KV-1s, T-34s, IS-2s, and IS-3s! The USSR uses brute strength to defeat its enemies! Germany fielding the most advanced, best in their class, though expensive units can bring down some real pain and terror if you know how to handle it. Having a hampered war economy will really cost you. Germany has high end units for every need, but for a price. Their Tiger tanks will wipe out entire armored columns! Their jet fights can handle any air opponent with ease. Their heavy Sturmgrenadier infantry is armed with the best weaponry Germany has to offer. Artillery includes StuG assault guns, Flak 88 guns, and more! If you have a well established economy you have nothing to worry about. The USA has everything for every need like Germany but does not have the best units. They balance quality with production rate and price. Making it the ideal nation to play as if you what to be effective in every field but not have your economy too strained.
Battles, Operations, and game modes: "Battles" are just skirmish battles you fight against the A.I.. There's also a "profile setting," which allows you to choose how the A.I. should most of the time play as, for example in the air force profile the A.I will mostly use fighters and bombers to attack you, and you get the idea. There's 6 profiles altogether, regular, air force, howitzer, prototype, blitzkrieg, and turtle. There's also 3 game settings, one: The choice for free-for-all and 2 team battles, the maximum on one map is 4 players.
War modes: You can choose which era you want to fight in: 1939, 1942, 1945, Total War, and Nuclear mode. Now what I mean by 1939, 1942, and 1945 modes is that, each unit in the game has a war make, which era it was made in and served in, so if I choose 1942 era war mode I'll only have access to units which were available up to 1942. In Total War mode, your war mode era starts from 1939 and progress every 10 minutes till 1945. And Nuclear mode is were you can deploy nuclear howitzers; this mode is really just a joke, you build a high end army and it can all blown away by one nuclear shell, its just a mode for messing around in. The total war and nuclear mode comes in the The Manhattan Project DLC, which is a free DLC available in the PSN store, the DLC also includes 3 new maps (see "Maps" section below). There's also the option for time 10, 25, 35, etc, minutes but there is NO option to put the timer off, the maximum time limit is 60 minutes! Operations are single player and co-op missions. There are 6 operation missions in total, two 1 VS 1 missions, 1 VS All is where you fight two or three A.I. opponents at once, and two co-op missions, you need a internet connection to play these two, you can host a private session to which you can invite friends to, or look up a match. Unit limit in Battles is 100 units. The DLCs add more missions also.
Units: Each nation has around 26 to 33 units, some nations may have more tanks then others. Units are deploy through industrial building, like barracks or a prototype base. After you build these buildings you get to deploy different units. You also get the ability to upgrade units, like a Panzer IV can be upgraded to a Panther tank. The bad thing is if you upgrade you won't be able to use the previous unit which you upgraded from, kind of stupid.
->Headquarters can deploy machine gun nests or bunkers, machine gun nest are fragile positions that can be destroyed fairly easily, but bunkers such as the German Siegfried Blockhaus is a very resistant bunker armed with a 88mm gun and a flamethrower for anti-personal proposes. Each fraction has it's own bunkers, but some of the nations have very, very weak bunkers, there's not always equality in the units which makes the gameplay much more dynamic.
->Barracks offer infantry and recon units, some nation's barracks can even deploy light tanks which are only affective against infantry. Infantry can engage tanks with Panzerschrecks, bazookas, but some units are stuck with using mere hand grenades! Infantry units can place ambushes in woods which triples their effectiveness and shelters them from damage.
->Artillery and Anti-air bases field--well--artillery and anti-air units. You can deploy Bofors, Flak 20mm, Flak 88mm, (88 guns are not only very affective against air units but also tanks), ZSU-37s, and all the other good stuff. But to make the Bofors and Flak 20s affective, you would have to deploy them in large numbers to have some kind of an affect. Artillery units for each nation is about 2-4, 2 howitzers and 2 assault guns but this is not the case for all nations!
->Armor bases field armored recon for some nations and tanks for all. They can deploy: armored recon, Light tanks, advanced light tanks (upgrade to advanced), medium tanks, advanced medium tanks, heavy tanks and advanced heavy tanks.
->Anti-tank bases field anti tank units, like towed AT guns and tank destroyers. The thing is that these units can only be used against tanks and vehicles, not infantry. Like a Jadgpanther during WWII had a secondly armament of a machine gun to deal with infantry but not in the game, it can't use its main gun either to attack infantry at all, so you have to send tanks with your tank destroys to protect them from infantry. Anti-tank units available are around 4.
->Moving on to airfields! You can deploy air recon, paratroopers, fighters, fighter-bombers, and bombers. There are about 7 units that can be deployed through the airfields. Now how fighters "work" in the game is after they have eliminated an air unit they will have to go back to the airfield and resupply. Fighters can also make ground attack runs on infantry, if the infantry unit is destroyed or not the fighter will still have to resupply, while fighting other fighters or bombers it will stay on the tail of its target and destroy it completely before returning to base. Of course you have to be carefully, and watch out for anti-air units, large groups of AA can tear planes to shreds.
->And at last there's the prototype base. Prototype bases field all the powerful and wacky weapons of WWII. There are about 3-5 units available. Which include, super-heavy tanks, like the German Maus, American T95, and the French FCM F1. There's also artillery like the 155mm Long Tom, 210mm Morser, armored anti-aircraft, flamethrower tanks, rocket launcher vehicles, like the Russian Katyusha.
When a unit is hurt or too damage to fight it retreats you know this when a flashing exclamation mark appears over the unit, if the unit keeps getting hit it'll eventually get destroyed.
Units are designated by chips, just like poker chips. Light units like infantry and recon are represented by small chips while tanks are represented by bigger chips. Unidentified aircraft are shown are arrowheads. But don't think they're just big and small poker chips running around--there are actual units just with subtle chips which help you see what they are... just search up "RUSE units" on Google and you'll get the idea.
Your army's units are always identified to you who sit on a chip. Units in close proximity to each other will be shown as stacked towers when you zoom out. Making them easy to move--select the tower and giving an order will give the order to all the troops in the stack.
Another thing is the UPlay points that you earn with which you can get the Super Perishing tank upgrade, you can upgrade your Perishing tanks to Super Pershings!(For those that don't know about UPlay read "UPlay" section below I've explained it there). That's all for units!
RUSE cards: This game has something called ruse cards, there special abilities that allow you to trick and deceive your enemy. The maps you play on are divided into sectors. You place your ruse card in one sector in which it takes affect for a certain period of time. Maximum amount of ruses that can be placed in one sector is 2. There are ruses that reveal information, those that hide information, those that allow for fake structures and units. They're some that are aggressive ruses, that increase unit speed, inspire units too fight to the death, and one that forces enemy units to flee faster. And another which allow you to revert intel, what this does is it chances the frequency of units, it disguises light units as heavy and heavy units as light. The enemy will get a big surprise! It take about 2 minutes for you to get a new ruse. A good example is from the game's manual, it says, "combining Decoy Army and Blitz, you can move your decoys to their target location fifty percent faster."
UPlay: UPlay is a points system, as you do missions in the game you get reward points, with those you can buy 4 things: the D-Day map, the premium theme of RUSE, the Super Perishing tank, or the Golden chips. You can find the UPlay option in the games main menu. I would highly suggest that you buy the D-Day map, it's a beautiful, big, great map, it's one of my favorites. The RUSE theme looks ok in the XMB but really isn't worth buying it, up to you though. Buying the Super Perishing tank grants you the option to upgrade your regular Perishing tanks to Super Perishings! As I explained before each unit has chips which designates them as units, lets say your chip color is blue, having the golden chips will give golden strips around the chip, nice golden look! I think if you earn these points from other UBISoft games you can use these in this game--not 100% sure though.
Maps: There are really only 17 maps (not including any Downloadable Content maps), they've put in 3 or 4 maps a second time with a different name, and a slightly different location of your HQ on the map. I think they did this because a few of the small maps in the game can be played 2 VS 2 in multiplayer and 4 VS 4 as well. In the map section there are 2 separate sections one for 2 VS 2 and another for 4 VS 4. There are small and big maps, whatever you want. There's a broad range of maps, there's some snowy maps, tropical, woodland, volcanic, yes there's one map where you fight around the base of a volcano. Each map has it's own strategic situation, meaning you can't use one tactic on every map you have to first study the map and see the best approach. Maps have a nice look to them, no glitches so far. The Manhattan Project adds 3 more maps. The volcano one, and 2 more islandy type maps. All of these are medium sized maps. The Chimera pack offers 3 more maps, one small desert map of North Africa, another desert map of medium size, and a snowy map called Nuclear Winter. The Pack of the Rising Sun is also a DLC but it doesn't add any new maps. The DLCs maps and maps already in the game can be played online and in single player "battles."
Income: You obtain money by deploying supply depots. But not just anywhere, they're fixed positions on the map that you send engineers to and they "recommission" the depot. Then supply trucks roll out and go to the nearest HQ or secondary HQ, each truck has 3 dollars and 3 truck come out at regular intervals. The trucks only use roads, so it's important to keep the roads secure. Supply depots have a limit of supplies or money, on top of the supply depot it says how much money is left in the depot. There can be $200 in the depot but it takes time for it to all come out. That's why as you play deploy supply depots to keep the money flowing, you'll be surprised how quickly you can go bankrupted! All the nations use dollars. Some unit costing $5 is cheap but something costing $40 or $50 is pretty pricey. Also keep in mind deploying a supply depot will raise you unit limit by one more. I'm saying that, if I have 20 units on the battlefield and I choose to deploy another supply depot, the unit counter will be raised to 21. In online gameplay, each truck carries 3 dollars but you only get 2 of the 3 dollars and the the 1 dollar left goes to your partner, if there is one. So you're funding each others war economy!
Glitches/freezes: There are some glitches that I've found, one is: a few times when I was playing a online or skirmish matches the terrain glitched, it was all blurry and whenever I tried restarting or quitting the match the PS3 froze, I had no idea why this was happening, later that day my friend told me sometimes the PS3 files get mixed up and told to me to restore my file system I did that and everything was fine after that. (If you don't know how to do that look it up on the internet or ask Sony, restoring the file system does not delete any files or data it only sorts them out) This thing has only happened twice since I've got the game and I've had the game for about one year. One other problem is that during online gameplay the server rips you and your partner apart and throws each of you in a different alternate dimensions or something! I was playing with a friend once and was talking with him with a microphone, suddenly a messages pops up and say that he had surrendered, I ask him why have you surrendered, he says that he hadn't, I play the game while talking to him, he finished the game before me and says he had won. I read on a forum that this thing has happened to someone else as well! I'm not sure how many times this has happened to me, but I'm not alone for sure. The online lobbies glitch a lot as well, many times when someone joins a lobby one person may see them there but another may not, and if the host starts the match the game will freeze at the loading screen, by "freeze" I don't mean PS3 freeze and you can't do anything, It will just not load and you'll have to quit the game. Tip: If you just sign out of PSN you won't have to quit the game back to the XMB, you'll be returned to the game menu. It's quite rare that the PS3 system freezes.
Graphics: The graphics are very good and I love zooming in all the way and strolling around the map.
Game engine, IRISZOOM: The game engine is called "IRISZOOM." It lets you zoom into the battlefield and have a view from the ground, you can adjust the zoom in and out as much as you like. The engine itself is very good, it runs the game fast, it's good quality.
Save system: The saving in this game is nice. You can pause anytime and save. If you load a saved game you'll be at the exact time you save it at, you won't start at a check point. There's also the auto save, every time you get to a check point it saves for you. You can save campaign missions, battles, and operations.
Multiplayer: The online is pretty nice, nothing new about it but it's very fun. People still play online, host rooms won't be filling up like Battlefield 3 matches but people still play. You best chances of playing online is during the afternoon when many people are online. Lag depends on your internet connection and the server you get connected to, sometimes I get no lag other times it's frozen with lag, it seems Ubisoft has the 3rd class servers set up for this game, or at least for the consoles.
Downloadable Content (DLC): There are 3 DLCs available for RUSE, one is the Pack of The Rising Sun, The Chimera pack and the Manhattan Project Pack.
The Pack of The Rising Sun offers the ability to play as the Japaneses nation, and includes 3 more operations. The Chimera pack has 3 more maps, and a few more operations, I think 3 more are added. And the Manhattan Project Pack is free, it has 3 more maps and 2 more modes: nuclear and total war. The Rising Sun DLC costs 9.99 dollars, the Chimera costs $6.99 and the Manhattan Project Pack is FREE, they're all on the Playstation Network Store.
Extras: In the main menu in the extras, there's a "Ruseopeida," in which you can look up the different nations units and read their descriptions, nice feature they added.
Concerns: Not many, just that there is a time limit and unit limit.
Conclusion: This is a very good game, with good graphics. It's fun, it's involving, and even though it's a few years old it's great. Anyone who likes strategy and WWII this is the game for you!
If you have any questions about the game ask me.
(This review has also been written by me on Amazon.com--letting you know so you don't think someone's going around copy pasting someone elses reviews)